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Yes, Duke Really Did Win That Way

It’s about time something finally went right for Duke after all these years.

There were moments, before it got crazy, when Wednesday night’s game between Duke and North Carolina in Chapel Hill appeared at risk of getting out of hand. ESPN commentator Dick Vitale was really leaning into his stories about how wonderful various players’ families were, the Blue Devils appeared vexed and incapable on offense after a hot start, and Carolina looked something like the national title contender they’re supposed to be. When Harrison Barnes scored to put the team up 10 with a little over two-and-a-half minutes left, sports columnists began writing their stories about UNC’s big win. Two-and-a-half minutes after that—and after Duke freshman Austin Rivers capped a wild Duke comeback with a buzzer-beating, game-winning three-pointer to silence the home crowd—the columnists were left pounding their delete buttons in awe. Things had gotten out of hand, all right.

“First came the mass gasp,” Sports Illustrated’s Andy Staples writes. “Then came the silence. As the scoreboard clicked to its final tally—Duke 85, North Carolina 84—the only sounds in the Dean Dome came from the Duke players, who piled atop Rivers on the opposite end of the court, and from the tiny clutch of Duke family members seated behind the Blue Devils’ bench.”

For all the great play on both sides that came before, it was the last two minutes of the contest that distilled both the greatness and the college basketball-ness of this great college basketball game. Things went suddenly and irretrievably pear-shaped for North Carolina—from a fluky own-goal tip-in of a Duke shot by Carolina center Tyler Zeller to the fact that the team didn’t even attempt a field goal in the last two minutes—just as Rivers, a blue-chip recruit who has had an up-and-down season, abruptly came into his own as the star he was expected to be. Rivers called it “the best feeling I’ve ever had.” For his father Doc, who was in the Dean Dome for the game before heading back to his gig as coach of the Boston Celtics, it might even have been sweeter.

“Thanks to Rivers, this game, that finish, that arcing 3 that hung in the air for 10 minutes—and every moment that led up to it—will become one of the all-time capital-M moments in a rivalry with too many to count already,” ESPN’s Eamonn Brennan writes. “Duke will remember it forever. UNC will do its best to forget. And Rivers—ballyhooed and beleaguered, embraced and dismissed—will see his name etched in Duke-Carolina lore forever.”

Finally, though, Capello’s departure—his tendering of his resignation and England’s decision to accept it—came down to something fairly simple: He no longer seemed the right man for the job. “Capello ached to reinvent himself,” Dominic Fifield writes. “[But] there are limits to the degree anyone can do that, especially a manager who had so often been treated as the final arbiter on everything. Autocrats, curiously enough, can be particularly vulnerable since their air of omniscience will become absurd as soon as they stumble.”

* * *

Every reasonable fan expected the super-compressed, lockout-shortened NBA season to be caked in rust for the first few weeks. Those reasonable fans have not been surprised to see those expectations come largely to life. But even after those first weeks of games that looked like unusually hotly contested preseason action, the quality of play in the NBA has remained consistently sloppy and occasionally downright shoddy this season. This means that scoring is down and turnovers up, and has left none other than Charles Barkley ripping the league for its poor quality of play. In short, the season has been a mess, if often an entertaining one.

That last part, as it turns out, might be the only one that matters, as NBA ratings have gone through the roof despite all those missed threes and bounce passes to courtside season-ticket holders. “It’d be a stretch to argue that lower quality play is driving the higher ratings, but perhaps not so implausible to think that the compressed schedule makes the league more appealing,” Slate’s Matthew Yglesias writes. “I can’t remember an NBA regular season this engaging. If a small decline in the quality of play is the price we need to pay to get a shorter, denser, more action-packed season each and every year, then I’m all for it.”

* * *

James Naismith’s name is on basketball’s Hall of Fame, and James McLendon Jr. is among the roundball legends enshrined there. But the two coaching greats—the man who invented the game of basketball and the coach known as the father of the fast break, respectively—have more in common than a place in basketball history. While the two both changed basketball in their own ways, they first met when working together to effect change on the University of Kansas in a smaller, and simultaneously greater way, way. At the Classical, Eric Angevine tells the story of how the unlikely pair—Naismith was already a legend, McLendon a freshman who wanted only to be able to swim in the school’s whites-only pool—worked together to strike a blow against segregation at the University of Kansas in the 1930s.

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Comments (1 of 1)

This is a Duke team that has underachieved and a Carolina team that is seriously over rated (what else is new) but this win means Duke has had a successful season, no matter what happens next. There is no sweeter sound than 21,000 smug celebrating Tarheel fans filling the Dean Dome with shocked silence. Schadenfreude at its best.Almost as satisfying was watching the stunned commentators on ESPN trying to figure out how this could have happened. How could the invincible Tarheels lose at home, to Duke of all teams? Never mind, they are still one of the 3 best college teams in the land according to Doug Gottleib, the ESPN analyst who is rarely in doubt and frequently wrong about college basketball. Old habits die hard.

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